"We wanted to look at people who were at a really important point in their lives and we wanted to get a picture of Alice Springs from those young people," she says.

"The ages of the people we spoke to...it's a critical time in your life...you're making quite big decisions without realising it...your attitude to school work, whether you think there's hope for you...and it is a time when people can go right off the rails.

Jenny says Alice Springs was chosen because recent portrayals of the town in the national media seemed to lack the perspective of it's young people.

"We felt that the one group that we hadn't heard from in terms of the place, and the life there, was teenagers, and particularly Indigenous teenagers," she says.

"We were told that it would be very difficult to get them to talk freely about what they thought...for all sorts of reasons, cultural reasons, personal reasons, just being teenagers! So there was a bit of scepticism from the adult world..."

But the young people involved in the episode proved that scepticism wrong, and Jenny says filming the episode was a powerful experience for her.

"It was hugely moving...this show had a really big impact on me," she says.

"These kids...the things that they face can often seem insurmountable and enormous, [but] sometimes it can be one thing that makes the difference, one person, one teacher, one employer, one person who has faith in them when they're living difficult lives," she says.

"I guess the thing that struck me the most is the importance of all those people around them, someone having faith in them that just..it only takes one person sometimes to tell a kid that's got promise - 'look, you could do this, you could do anything really...I think that's one of the things I came away with."